IN FRATERNAM MEAM: BLOGG: UNDERSTANDING THE NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

IN FRATERNAM MEAM

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

BLOGG: UNDERSTANDING THE NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

"The term BLOG is short for "Web log" -- an online site wuth time-dated postings, maintained by one ormore posters, that features links and commentary."

WHY DO BLOGGERS BLOG? AND WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU!

Two reasons: to persuade,and to leave a record having been there. Both are vain efforts in the long haul. Both efforts have never not been hallmarks of humanity.

What is new to blogsphere is that there are no barriers to entry to a world offering a nearly limitless audience. There is a vast audience of wisdom/entertainment seekers.

Many, many are the blogs that will go unread except for a college roommate or a brother-in-law. Some people will grow tired and abandon the effort. Others will muscle on despite low traffic. What you have to be concerned about are those folks who arrive out of nowhere and surge to tens fo thousands and then hundreds of thousands of daily visits.

That is the key number, btw. Page views are like Confederate currency: fun to have but worthless.

Blogging is just a new means of transmitting that writing, one that bypasses completely all editors. The public becomes the editor. And that is a very good thing unless you got paid or derived status from being an editor.

The Credibility of blogs depends on their timeliness and accuracy, but invariably, the qualifications of the bloggers matter as well.

Keep in mind that newcomers with talent find their sites are quickly mentioned and adopted, with staggering rises in traffic as a result.

Traffic is not the only thing to consider. Technorati is an extraordinary tool for tracking the rise of stories on the blogspheres as well as cross referencing posts.

"The Power of the Tail".
It is a counterintuitive idea, so it takes a couple of moments to get, but once again, it cannot be abandon once gotten, it cannot be abandoned without losing a glimpse of the extraordinary powers of the medium.

"The Tail" is simply the 95 to 99 percent of blogs that are not giant traffic getters. These are low or medium traffic generators, some getting ten visitors a day, some a hundred, some a few hundred. Their traffic is steady, but it isn't growing at a great rate, if at all.

It is called "The Tail" as such because on a graph of where traffic is located, the first few score blogs show huge numbers, but quickly the line plummets but goes on and on, out through the universe of millions and millions of blog -- the very long tail of the blogosphere.

"The power of the tail" is the aggregate number of visitors, not to any particular blog within the tail, but collectively to all blogs on the tail and the fact that these low or medium traffic blogs generally enjoy the trust of their visitors.

The low or moderate traffic blog fills a niche parallel to that PTA newsletter, the church bulletin and perhaps the local free weekly that covers high school sports. Once the technology develops to identify who is reading these blogs and where, watch for marketing gurus to figure out how to use blogs to penetrate a particular market.

There is one key to the tail: Build a high traffic blog and then offer links to other bloggers who cover what you would like covered. Other techniques will emerge, such as contests or awards, but the tail matters -- and whoever figures out ways to drive messages into that tail will have achieved an enormous advantage for his point of view or product.

FINDING A BLOGGER FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION'S BLOG.

The best bloggers have self-selected themselves already. Spend a week on the web, following your nose, zipping from site to site. Ignore the design. Ignore color. Find who can write and who is ridiculously productive. One of the resons old media hates new media so much is that new media is so much more productive that old media. Every day bloggers churn out postings by the hundreds of thousands, and some of us will post a dozen times a day, each one of wich is worth reading.

Find five bloggers you like, preferably with medium traffice scores -- not high, unless you have big bucks, and not so low as to fail a hurdle that must be passed every day.

Start three prototypes and run them internally for a month. Pick the best, or if they don't work start over. Get good confidentiality agreements at the startm and part company on good terms with any blogger who leaves. It isnt' hard to figure this out.

(abstracted from the book:"BLOG Understanding the Information Reformation that's Changing Your World" by: Hugh Hewitt (www.HughHewitt.com)

posted by infraternam meam @ 3:05 AM

0 Comments: